Critique of Political Economy

Episode 1

I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order:capital,landed property,wage-labour;the State,foreign trade,world market.The economic conditions of existence of the three great classes into which modern bourgeois society is divided are analysed under the first three headings;the interconnection of the other three headings is self-evident.

The first part of the first book,dealing with Capital,comprises the following chapters:1.The commodity,2.Money or simple circulation;3.Capital in general.The present part consists of the first two chapters.The entire material lies before me in the form of monographs,which were written not for publication but for self-clarification at widely separated periods;their remoulding into an integrated whole according to the plan I have indicated will depend upon circumstances.

A general introduction,which I had drafted,is omitted,since on further consideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated,and the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the general.A few brief remarks regarding the course of my study of political appropriate here.

Although I studied jurisprudence,I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history.In the year 1842-43,as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung,I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests.The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division of landed property;the officials polemic started by Herr von Schaper,then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province,against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry,and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions.On the other hand,at that time when good intentions "to push forward"often took the place of factual knowledge,an echo of French socialism and communism,slightly tinged by philosophy,was noticeable in the Rheinische Zeitung.I objected to this dilettantism,but at the same time frankly admitted in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung that my previous studies did not allow me to express any opinion on the content of the French theories.When the publishers of the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it,I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study.

The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law;the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher issued in Paris in 1844.My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind,but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life,the totality of which Hegel,following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century,embraces within the term "civil society";that the anatomy of this civil society,however,has to be sought in political economy.The study of this,which I began in Paris,I continued in Brussels,where I moved owing to an expulsion order issued by M.Guizot.The general conclusion at which I arrived and which,once reached,became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows.In the social production of their existence,men inevitably enter Into definite relations,which are independent of their will,namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,the real foundation,on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social,political and intellectual life.It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,but their social existence that determines their consciousness.At a certain stage of development,the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or --this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms --with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.Then begins an era of social revolution.